Harold Macmillan: Volume One, by Alistair Horne
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
T oward the end of his six-and-a- l half-year tenure as prime minister, Harold Macmillan did something very out of character: he lost his head. It happened at Madame Tiissaud's. The strains of...
...and his genuine piety (he was probably one of the few Anglicans in the twentieth century who prayed daily and meant it...
...Writing in 1946, Bruce Lockart saw the strengths of the self-made public man: [Macmillan] may yet succeed Winston...
...Thatcher's response to Argentine aggression in the Falklands, he persisted in sniping at the crude but vital side of renascent Tory capitalism at home...
...24.96 Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989...
...history, and the arts in America and England...
...Only occasionally did an observer come close to cracking Macmillan's psychic code, and then the key was usually artistic and intuitive, rather than political...
...More than eleven years later, when Macmillan finally did succeed to Number 10, a young British journalist, Henry Fairlie, told Malcolm Muggeridge what high hopes he had for the new P.M.'s "qualities and skills...
...Three years after his death at 92, he remains something of an enigma, even to as skilled a biographer as Alistair Home...
...By the time he became prime minister, he had ceased to believe in many of the very qualities of his fellow countrymen that have led to .a national revival under a less subtle but more resolute Margaret Thatcher...
...his outstanding diplomatic work during World War II (Macmillan deserves credit for appreciating the importance of de Gaulle and laboring heroically to soothe Le Grand Charles's ego without letting it get out of control...
...Unfortunately, the same wounds that strengthened Macmillan personally seem to have left him with a jaded, fatalistic view of his country and the world...
...Rare, indeed, is the leader whose best ideals have not predeceased him on the way up what Disraeli called "the greasy pole" of politics...
...No perceptive journalists who viewed Macmillan at turning points in his career have left us vignettes that may tell us more about his strengths and limits as a politician than Home does...
...H orne is at his best when writing about his subject's best points: his physical courage and deep feeling for literature (gravely wounded in no man's land during the Great War, Macmillan browsed through a copy of Aeschylus's Prometheus—in the original Greek, naturally—while waiting for the stretcher-bearers...
...Almost always...
...If so, Macmillan's fatalism was justified, though hardly in the way he thought...
...In his last years, while supporting, like the good non-appeaser he was, Mrs...
...domestic "wet" and external hawk: Harold Macmillan was a bundle of contradictions to most of his contemporaries...
...The single-minded bumblebee, oblivious to scientific doubts about her ability to fly, has soared to political heights the blasé old eagle never even attempted...
...HAROLD MACMILLAN: VOLUME ONE: 1894-1956 Alistair Horne/Viking/537 pp...
...He was always clever, but was shy and diffident, had a clammy handshake and was more like a wet fish than a man...
...Again and again, Home has difficulty in judging the deeper motivations for many of his subject's most important decisions and actions, despite his close collaboration, as official biographer, with Macmillan during the last decade of Macmillan's life...
...Inevitability perceived fast becomes inevitability achieved...
...Eden fell, Macmillan became prime minister, and, on this note of slightly tawdry triumph, the first volume of Alistair Home's absorbing and thorough biography ends...
...Perhaps it irked him to see so much life restored to a body he had given up for dead generations ago...
...Ian) Fleming in July 1963, shrewdly, if crankily, suggested that Macmillan, like Sir Winston & Lord Hailsham, is 1/2 American & cannot be judged by English standards...
...In this respect, though not in many others, Harold Macmillan was a very common man...
...canny executive in the family firm...
...The futile slaughter of World War I, the paralysis of the interwar years, and the drab new egalitarian social order of Britain's welfare state robbed this personally resilient and decent man of the confidence it takes toturn, rather than flow with, the tide...
...He has grown in stature during the war more than anyone...
...courageous, repeatedly wounded World War I hero...
...And what a life it was...
...Edwardian traditionalist and social reformer...
...by the time he grasped the tiller in 1957, Macmillan was more of a socialist than a conservative on most domestic issues...
...There is also the question of Macmillan's political—as opposed to his personal—ethics...
...His private life was largely a succession of torments stoically endured, his public life a series of unexpected and usually triumphant Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Cowed mama's boy of an overbearing Puritan heiress from Spencer, Indiana (father was head of the respectable British publishing house that still bears the family name...
...The strains of office had graven themselves so deeply into Macmillan's sensitive, finely furrowed face, with its distant, drooping eyes and eternally shrugging brows, that a new, but far older-looking wax head was brought in to replace the one that had topped the prime ministerial effigy since 1957...
...Macmillan himself had long since shed more than one layer of personal and political skin, to the puzzlement of both critics and supporters...
...Now he is full of confidence and is not only not afraid to speak but jumps in and speaks brilliantly [in the House of Commons...
...tormented cuckold...
...Subject and biographer are both weaker in those hazy political regions where, in the absence of an overriding philosophy, actions are driven by motives—and open to explanations—that are sometimes less than edifying...
...They always get it too late...
...Experience can deceive as well as inform...
...He has a better mind than Anthony [Eden, whom Macmillan would later gently dismiss as "basically not an interesting man...
...Worst of all he saw the light and rejected it...
...Since he took the precaution of destroying his diary entries during the Suez crisis, we will never know what was running through Macmillan's mind when he first egged on the unstable Anthony Eden to join with France and Israel in attacking Nasser, only to jump ship when thetacit American support for the venture (which he incorrectly told Eden was a sure thing) turned out to be active opposition...
...bookish religious devotee...
...By the early 1940s, as Macmillan confided to diarist Harold Nicolson, he viewed "extreme Socialism as inevitable, with the Conservatives standing not so much for property, as for private lives...
...All his friends were killed in the [First World] war...
...I think he has grown a carapace of cynicism to protect a tender conscience...
...writes and broadcasts on politics...
...On the other hand, all this may have been the necessary prerequisite to radical reform, the nightmare before the awakening...
...Sensible management and a certain standard of deportment became the end-all of his policy agenda, and he succeeded in delivering some short-term gains in living standards without correcting the basic flaws in Britain's over-taxed, under-productive welfare economy...
...Macmillan's doctrinal errors, compounded by the mismanagement of Labour's Harold Wilson and the personal ineptitude of the Conservatives' Edward Heath (the brief, caretaker terms of Alec Douglas-Home and James Callaghan were mere interludes), left Britain at its lowest ebb in modern history...
...and sage elder statesman whose imperturbable facade covered a lifelong tendency toward melancholy...
...metamorphoses, culminating in the image of "Super Mac," the unflappable P.M...
...He never had a chance to read...
...As Fairlie recently recalled in the pages of the New Republic, Muggeridge replied, "I agree, my dear boy, but he's got to power too late...
...A man of private piety, probity, and charm, he could be ruthless with those who stood in the way of his career...
...If he had made his submission to the [Roman Catholic] Church in 1910 when he momentarily decided to, he would not be prime minister nor married to a Cavendish but he would have been a happy and virtuous publisher...
...Thus, Evelyn Waugh, in a letter to Ann (Mrs...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
